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I chose to be Primal by using sheer common sense. I read what Mark had to say and it clicked, I immediately felt better and began looking better after just a week (glowing skin, complexion etc.) I just know from my own experiences what works and what doesn't work for my body. I feel that there is no better lab rat than myself.

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You want to start with common sense. What do wild humans eat?... Animals and plants. So what should you feed your human? The same... Always start with common sense.

Absolutely agree with this. As soon as I read the OP, my first thought was Occam's Razor - "a principle urging one to select from among competing hypotheses the one which makes the fewest assumptions and offers the simplest explanation of the effect." For me, Paleo/Primal wins hands down on that.

Plus when I'm standing in the grocery store, the simplest options, and the ones which I have to make the fewest assumptions about their goodness for me, are whole, unrefined, single ingredient foods -- plants, animals, nuts, etc.

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To the OP's question, I'm sorry to say there is no answer to that. In your life you'll only ever know what's optimal for you, and you'll only know that through personal experimentation. If you ever find yourself in a social setting (like this internet forum perhaps) with such a strict dogma that personal experimentation is not incouraged, I'd suggest moving along. I don't however think that would be an accurate description of the crowd gathered here, although I do admit every group has it's outliers.

While this won't be an answer, it does make for an interesting exercise.....

Imagine that most of what you "know" about nutrition came from studies funded by Agri-business. Whole grains lower bad cholesterol for example. Well, lets also imagine what you know about blood cholesterol came from studies funded by Pharma-business. LDL-c numbers are an indicator of CVD or heart attack risk and HDL numbers should be higher for example. These are "truths" in the medical industry today, and no run of the mill doctor will stray from the book in diagnosing and perscribing for you. They won't risk a lawsuit, and the "book of truths" protects them. Dogma.

Now lets imagine there's a backlash to this. Pioneers of "paleo" theory take it in the extreme opposite direction. No grain is acceptable, carbohyrates in all forms are poison, that's why you make ketones, etc.

Like most things in life, I imagine the closest thing to truth lies somewhere in the middle, getting drowned out by the outliers having a shout down at one another.

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No I do not. I said look at the bloodwork posted by current members of this forum.

The bloodwork is all over the place, what kind of sane conclusion am I supposed to draw from that?

Originally posted by Sihana

Most of the wheat produced in America is GMO. Corn and Soy are close behind.

Is paleo lifestyle only practiced in the United States? If so, then no wonder your perspective is limited to that culture alone. And when you say America are you referring to geographical location or political?
These arguments and debates where there are such large swooping generalizations and are based on such limited cultures without broader global context are prove to me that I can't take any of this "evidence" seriously.

Originally posted by Sihana

The African Buffalo is a lot different than a domesticated cow, but both of them evolved naturally and through husbandry. Do not mince my words.

Are you serious? African Buffalo has been domesticated? I would like to know where exactly the African Buffalo has been domesticated. Please don't quote Zoos.

Originally posted by Sihana

People generally did not make agriculture a staple until 10,000 BC.

What is this supposed to mean? Generally? SO did they or did they not? How do you know that 25,000BC there was no domestication of any kind practiced? Can you find evidence against it?

Originally posted by Sihana

When it was eaten, it was prepared because it made tasty things. Remember, most grains only have themselves as their only defense. Something that kills a rat that eatss it probably just would make a very large mammal or human sick, but not kill it.

Again, it's your assumption based on what?

Originally posted by Sihana

Look at their health, how many of them are truly healthy? How many of them show no signs of diseases? How many of them have widsom teeth?

Does such data exist for global population? If so point me to it. Please give me examples of societies/cultures to prove your point.

Originally posted by Sihana

You have not even mentioned what your culture is, you are dodging the issue, and it sounds like you have already made up your mind about the issue, and are just here looking to attack our ways. Most of us here eat meat, and plenty of veggies and fruits. We know by our OWN EXPERIENCES, that we react badly to certain things. Regular corn makes me sick/foggy, sprouted corn does not. Cow dairy makes me break out, goat dairy does not. Wheat makes my skin turn ashy, my brain foggy, and makes my periods harder. Soy makes me have two periods a month, no joke.

Please show the relevance of my culture to this conversation.
You are dodging the issue as much as I am, obviously you have made up your mind. Sorry that inquisitive mind questioning things means attacking to you. I think I am debating and you think I am attacking.
I also eat meat and plenty of veggies and fruits, how am I different from you then? I also know by my OWN EXPERIENCE, so is your anecdotal experience better than mine or is it just different?

So back to original question "Why Mark?" Still no idea. Inconclusive evidence, too many broad generalizations for me.

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So back to original question "Why Mark?" Still no idea. Inconclusive evidence, too many broad generalizations for me.

Haha For Christ's sake lady, we get it. You're too smart to fall for anything. You can find the flaws in any argument. Well, NO $#!t!!! You also haven't offered any positive assertions, just questions OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. That doesn't demonstrate intelligence on your part, it just confirms you as a contrarian. Are you currently ping-ponging back and forth between this site and The Vegan Warehouse where you diligently prod them to re-explain "what exactly is your problem with steak again"?

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Haha For Christ's sake lady, we get it. You're too smart to fall for anything. You can find the flaws in any argument. Well, NO $#!t!!! You also haven't offered any positive assertions, just questions OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN. That doesn't demonstrate intelligence on your part, it just confirms you as a contrarian. Are you currently ping-ponging back and forth between this site and The Vegan Warehouse where you diligently prod them to re-explain "what exactly is your problem with steak again"?

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As my comment refers to your action or behavior, and is therefore an observation, making no reference to the validity of your questions or specifically the content of your previous conversation, ad hominem hardly fits. In order to attack you personally to cover the weakness of my argument, I would have to first stipulate that I were actually participating in a debate with you which is very much not the case. In fact, based on your previous comments, I think that would be a fool's errand (with no offense intended to anyone who has taken up the task on this forum or elsewhere). As far as I can tell, the only satisfactory answer one could give you is "You know, you're right. I don't know what I was thinking." Anything else runs the risk of provoking a barrage of questions which seem to imply as much the ignorance of the second party as it asserts the superior critical thinking skills of the first.

To put it more simply, you come off like an A-hole. I'm sure you're not, because I have no reason to assume that you are, but the font doesn't convey that on message boards.

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These are the reasons why I am having second thoughts about the whole paleo premise. A lot of it is a supposition and speculation what constituted a diet 10,000BC.

I must admit, I couldn't care less about Grok. Like you, I don't believe it's possible to know to any degree of accuracy what all Groks over tens of thousands of years and thousands of square miles of different habitats and climates ate or didn't eat and in what proportions. I do not consider anyone's speculation about what our remote ancestors did to be evidence about what is good for us now.

But here's the thing. It's not supposed to be. You'll see lots of people here and elsewhere saying things like 'PalŠolithic humans did x, therefore we should do x'. But that's the wrong way round. Speculation about how palŠolithic humans evolved is only an explanation, a rationale, for the evidence we see about the way our bodies work. (And an inspirational marketing exercise, and a way of helping us to understand how the theory works in practice.)

Mark posts lots of links to peer-reviewed scientific studies in his posts. But ok, he's selling primal powder, fair enough. Here are some sites not selling anything, that list and review published scientific literature on the subject:

Naturally these people will be highlighting studies that support their opinion. But we all do that. And they also analyse a lot of studies that suggest or conclude the opposite.

I agree with you about not clinging to one ideology. It's always important to look at the evidence for yourself. And you'll find Mark agrees with you that 'the perfect diet does not exist'. That's why he's so keen on self-experimentation: finding out what works best for you.

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As my comment refers to your action or behavior, and is therefore an observation, making no reference to the validity of your questions or specifically the content of your previous conversation, ad hominem hardly fits. In order to attack you personally to cover the weakness of my argument, I would have to first stipulate that I were actually participating in a debate with you which is very much not the case. In fact, based on your previous comments, I think that would be a fool's errand (with no offense intended to anyone who has taken up the task on this forum or elsewhere). As far as I can tell, the only satisfactory answer one could give you is "You know, you're right. I don't know what I was thinking." Anything else runs the risk of provoking a barrage of questions which seem to imply as much the ignorance of the second party as it asserts the superior critical thinking skills of the first.

To put it more simply, you come off like an A-hole. I'm sure you're not, because I have no reason to assume that you are, but the font doesn't convey that on message boards.

You clearly don't like people raising questions you have no answers to. That's OK, you don't have to like everybody. You are entitled to ignore button. Just like the previous poster, did the right thing by putting me on ignore as they have no answers to my questions and any evidence to support their stance.
Besides implying someone's lack of intelligence is bordering on ad-hominem and it also displays superiority complex, in my definition, yours may differ.

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I must admit, I couldn't care less about Grok. Like you, I don't believe it's possible to know to any degree of accuracy what all Groks over tens of thousands of years and thousands of square miles of different habitats and climates ate or didn't eat and in what proportions. I do not consider anyone's speculation about what our remote ancestors did to be evidence about what is good for us now.

But here's the thing. It's not supposed to be. You'll see lots of people here and elsewhere saying things like 'PalŠolithic humans did x, therefore we should do x'. But that's the wrong way round. Speculation about how palŠolithic humans evolved is only an explanation, a rationale, for the evidence we see about the way our bodies work. (And an inspirational marketing exercise, and a way of helping us to understand how the theory works in practice.)

Mark posts lots of links to peer-reviewed scientific studies in his posts. But ok, he's selling primal powder, fair enough. Here are some sites not selling anything, that list and review published scientific literature on the subject:

Naturally these people will be highlighting studies that support their opinion. But we all do that. And they also analyse a lot of studies that suggest or conclude the opposite.

I agree with you about not clinging to one ideology. It's always important to look at the evidence for yourself. And you'll find Mark agrees with you that 'the perfect diet does not exist'. That's why he's so keen on self-experimentation: finding out what works best for you.

Thank you for a very nice post. I will follow through the links you posted.
I agree I am sort of stuck in the middle of all this research and evidence. That's why I am not 100% sure that this lifestyle is the ultimate one although I am embracing some of it.

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A few thoughts for the skeptics:
1) There isn't ever going to be a well-funded piece of research looking into the primal diet. Such a study would be very expensive and take many years to conduct. So, who's going to pay for it? Nobody. High quality health research (large scale double blind experiments) gets conducted in order to find out which drugs are most useful. Low-quality research, relying on questionnaires and such (retrospective, epidemiological, etc.), gets done on diets all the time but the results of those studies are not very consistent, accurate, or useful because the methods are very limited. "Truth" and "proof" are extremely hard or impossible to come by in science, harder than people think.
2) As far as grains and evolutionary adaptation, when humans first ate them, whether those grains were different than our grains. It doesn't matter. That debate doesn't matter. It only matters if not eating grains makes YOU healthier. For me, it clearly makes a huge difference in my own health. Whether Egyptians ate them 20,000 years ago or not has nothing to do with it.
3) Don't confuse "the science" with "what newspapers say" - scientists and, slowly, doctors are, for example, coming around to the idea that heart disease is caused by inflammation and not by cholesterol. Newspapers and major websites are not run by scientists but the articles are written by reporters with space to fill. Repeating what everyone thinks is true is an easy way to do that.

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3) Don't confuse "the science" with "what newspapers say" - scientists and, slowly, doctors are, for example, coming around to the idea that heart disease is caused by inflammation and not by cholesterol. Newspapers and major websites are not run by scientists but the articles are written by reporters with space to fill. Repeating what everyone thinks is true is an easy way to do that.

This gets to the heart of it

I would also like to add, to the OP, two critical things.

First, it's not just Mark vs CW studies. You just found him first. Mark is sort of to paleo diet research as the New York Times is to conventional wisdom - he reports in lay terms what has been discovered by people who work in very narrow, very finely-tuned, very esoteric areas of biochemical and nutritional expertise. He's not actually doing research himself, he's reviewing literature published by scientists. If you hunt around, you'll find his sources are numerous and extremely competent. You'd also find the same if you hunt around in CW-supporting literature. (Which, by the way, is published in the same journals as the paleo-supporting literature. This is what the peer-review process of science is for.)

So why can't research all agree? Why does some of it seem to promote CW and some promote paleo? Well, science isn't as quick, as neat, or as conclusive as the lay public likes to think. Particularly not in biology. Science measures systems and how they work, and systems don't get any more complex than this. (Think about contrasting whole-animal metabolism or ecological dynamics with something like how a car hood crumples when it strikes a wall at 50mph. The first two have a hell of a lot more variables and influences than the third.) So taking studies and saying they support one thing or another isn't really possible - rather, each study should be considered separately, as part of a mosaic of how things work. Also, studies are only as good as their sampling design - and there are a lot of studies out there that sample nutritional health poorly. (Think of all those studies from the 1990s lumping bologna in with steak to call someone a meat eater - it doesn't really take into account everything that could be going on.) If you want to know who the actual researchers are, I would suggest checking out people like Loren Cordain and co-authors. Also, try looking up the referenced papers at wholehealthsource.blogspot.com, as that's a bit more science-bent and less markety than MDA.

The second point you might consider is the historical aspect of how conventional wisdom became conventional. This isn't caveman history, this is recent history - think 20th century. In the 1970s, two things happened simultaneously: first, the Nixon administration encouraged the mass agriculture of corn and got the food industry to switch to high fructose corn syrup (away from cane sugar) in order to boost the U.S. economy. Second, the obesity & heart disease crises started to gain recognition, and everybody cast around for a reason why. Two competing theories came up: the fat hypothesis, and the sugar hypothesis. Both had support from different researchers, but it was the public health officials who had to make a judgement and then use that judgement to direct policies which could tell people how to eat healthier. (This is summarized really well here BBC News - What caused the obesity crisis in the West? by the way.) Basically, the fat hypothesis won, in part because the corn industry didn't want to have to turn around and stop making lots of cash from its HFCS production. It's not like it was a huge evil conspiracy, just kind of an unfortunate mistake involving lobbyists. Remember that none of this was happening overtly publicly either - these were governmental policy decisions that people don't generally pay lots of attention to. So the result was a massive PR campaign to cut fat; if you cut fat, you need flavour somehow else; that flavour started to come a lot from sugar, in processed foods. That massive PR campaign also included lots of research grants toward finding out how fat worked and come up with reasons as to why it was bad and how we could fix it, and that unfortunately skewed some of the ways studies were conducted (mostly through sampling - see above, or by using animal models that we didn't realize at the time were faulty - e.g. the cholesterol-fed rabbit). So research that contrasted this growing conventional wisdom wasn't really coming through or getting as much attention in publication, because it was in contradiction to what the PR message was supposed to be.

To everyone else on this forum - don't get too mad at Kathy for being aggressively clueless in this context, or the OP for asking the question. I think they represent a major failing of our education system in terms of HOW SCIENCE WORKS. We get taught facts, not how the facts are found, and it's really hard to understand how facts are found unless you get all the way to doing genuine experimental design, data collection, and statistical analysis. And under the current system, you just don't get that unless you do a university degree in science. This leaves the general public hearing "science!" and either being REALLY SUSPICIOUS of it (see the religious right) or thinking, "but this is what SCIENCE SAYS!".

I would also wish that basic education would include more market economics, because I have no fucking clue how that works and it doesn't seem like the market economists do very well at it either.